‘What do you mean fair ? They came here for no reason but to wreck our clusters, and to—’
‘But we’d wreck their clusters, wouldn’t we, if we had the chance? And anyway, maybe that wasn’t the real reason they came over here. Those men said, didn’t they, that they’d come over to tell us their story.’
‘Oh and that makes it okay, does it? The fact they came here to spread their lies and their filth makes it okay that they fight and do for our boys?’ Tom wasn’t much of an actor, but now he put on a silly voice and a silly face, and tried his best to say his words in something that sounded a bit like New Earth speech. ‘“President is rarly a marn,”’ he squeaked. ‘“Gela gave Jarn the ring.”’
‘I’m just saying—’
‘You’re not just saying anything, girl, if you’ve got even a bit of sense left in you.’ He’d turned his big thick guard’s spear upside down and was waving the blunt end of it in his daughter’s face. ‘You’re not saying anything else at all, if you don’t want this across your back.’
He looked round for support and straight away spotted me watching them.
‘You tell her, Angie. She won’t listen to me. You were with that shadowspeaker all that time. You talked with her about the mind of our Mother. You tell this dumb dumb daughter of mine what Mother Gela thinks about the Johnfolk!’
‘I don’t want to get involved in this, Tom,’ I told him. I was worried for my own kids as much as anything. Fox and Candy were watching Tom and Trueheart with big scared eyes as round as a bat’s. They’d been through so much already that waking, but they knew as well as I did that Tom might suddenly decide at any moment that it was time to give Trueheart a beating, and they always dreaded that. ‘We’re all tired,’ I said to Tom. ‘We’re all tired and scared, and—’
Clare came striding in between her daughter and Tom. ‘You’re as bad as each other, Tom and Trueheart. Just shut up both of you, and think of the rest of us for once.’
‘You shut up!’ Tom bellowed at her. ‘You will not talk to me like that! I’m the cluster head of Michael’s Place, and you’re just one of my shelterwomen. No wonder Trueheart behaves like she does, the example you give her!’
‘One of your shelterwomen! Listen to yourself ! Harry’s sister-slipping dick, Tom, who do you think you are? David Strongheart?’
‘As to those shadowspeakers, Dad,’ Trueheart said, ‘doesn’t it ever strike you as funny that whenever they tell us something Mother Gela is supposed to have said to them, it’s always exactly what the high people say as well? They know where their meat comes from, that’s pretty obvious; they know who to please if they want to keep their fancy wraps!’
Tom didn’t answer her in words. He just kind of roared, and, pushing past Clare, he began slashing down at his daughter with the end of his spear, not just across her back, but onto her face, her belly, anywhere at all that he could reach. Trueheart screamed, holding her arm in front of her face to shield it, and sinking to the ground. Four five littles started to cry, including my Candy. And everyone else, weary from walking and lack of sleep, and just from being so scared for so so long, either simply turned away from them and began to trudge on, or yelled at the two of them to stop.
‘Gela’s heart, Tom, just leave her alone for once, can’t you,’ some folk shouted, ‘and let us have some peace?’
Others told Trueheart to apologize. ‘Why have you always got to be so bloody stubborn, girl? Just say you’re sorry for once, and he’ll let you be.’
‘Yes, that’s right, say you’re sorry,’ bellowed Tom, still trying to hit her with his spear, while Clare and Kate and Davidson grabbed hold of his arm to stop him, and dragged him slowly away from his cowering daughter. ‘Say you’re sorry, you bad bad girl.’
Trueheart climbed to her feet again, though she was bleeding from the side of her mouth and had a big red weal across her arm.
‘Say you’re sorry,’ Tom kept shouting. Clare and the others were still holding onto him but they could tell that the fight had gone out of him, and they were beginning to loosen their grip. ‘Or would you prefer to run after your darling Headmanson back there, and his pretty slip-buddy Teacher Gerry?’
Trueheart didn’t answer him. She was close to tears, but she refused to let herself give way to them. She just turned away from her father and carried on walking towards Davidstand, clutching her hurt arm with her hand. The rest of us walked on as well, almost in silence, except for the mums like me who were murmuring to our tired scared crying kids to try and calm them down again. Wearily wearily we trudged on towards Davidstand, though we had no idea what we’d do there, or how we’d put food in our mouths.
I didn’t say it aloud, but I thought to myself that it might have been better to have taken the Johnfolk’s offer and gone back to Michael’s Place to live under their protection. We knew how to feed ourselves there, after all.
But then again, we had to think about what the guards would say about that, if they managed to drive the Johnfolk out again. We had to think about what they would say, and how they’d treat us, if they thought we’d gone over to the Johnfolk in any way.
Fourteen
Way way up rockway, me and Mary came to the ground called Rockway Edge, where Wide Forest and Worldpool come together like the fingers of two hands sliding in between one another, so that forest and water lie side by side in narrow bands: forest, water, forest, water, shining, glowing, shining. The guards that had been with us since we met the Hiding People turned and rode back into their ground and new ones from Rockway Edge began to ride with us. I rode our buck while Mary strode along beside me to stretch out her legs.
Long ago, Mary told me, the people in Rockway Edge used to be Johnfolk. There’d been a little group of them up here, as far rockway as you can go, a bit like the other lot way down alpway at Brown River, at far end of Wide Forest. But there hadn’t been so many up here as there were down there. So, while the Brown River lot had managed to keep their own Headman and their own ground and their own story, up here at Rockway Edge, Great David’s son, Harry Stonehand, had been able to surround the Johnfolk with so many guards that they had no chance of either beating him or getting away from him. Stonehand had given them a choice. Either their blokes could fight him until none of them were left alive – in which case he’d take all the women and kids to be helpers and bedwarmers for him and his leaders, and send good Davidfolk up to live on their ground and in their shelters – or they could agree to turn their backs on John and come back to True Family – in which case they could keep their shelters and carrying on living here as they’d done before.
‘He gave the Edgefolk two wakings to decide,’ Mary said. ‘He even had horns blown to mark the time. One blast at the beginning of each waking, two in middle, and three when the waking was done. The whole first waking went by and nothing came back to him. Then the second waking came. The first horn blew. Nothing. The two blasts blew. Nothing. But right at the end of that second waking, just as Harry’s guard was blowing the third of the three horn blasts, the Headman of Rockway Edge came and knelt down in front of Harry and told him his people would come back to the Family of Gela.’
Mary’d had enough of walking now, so she climbed up on the buck behind me, and we began to ride out onto one of those narrow fingers of ground, in between two fingers of water. There were strange creatures here. Three small bucks ran across our path and dived into the water, heading down into the shiny wavyweed, as easily as if water was where they always lived. Their four hind feet had skin stretched between their toes so they could use them like paddles as well as walk on them, and they didn’t use their front legs as legs for walking or swimming at all, but held them out before themselves, like the arms of a fish.
‘The wonderful thing,’ Mary said, ‘is that the Edgefolk have ended up truer and better Davidfolk than anyone. As best they can when they’re so far away, they try and mark the Virsry every yea
r at the time it’s marked at Circle Valley, and at each Virsry they have a special way of remembering how they were Johnfolk in the past and how they used to follow a story that was a lie. Every one of the young men whose new hairs have finished growing since the last Virsry lets himself be tied to a spiketree, just as Great David always said should have happened to John. Every single one of them! They’re tied to the hot tree for a whole minute – the people count out the sixty heartbeats – long enough for most of the skin to be burnt right off their backs. Imagine the courage to do that! Imagine the love they must feel for Gela and her True Family! But for the rest of their lives, the men carry those scars with pride.’
‘We surely do,’ said one of the two young guards who were riding with us. With a big smile, he proudly pulled his wrap down off his shoulders so we could see the pink twisted skin on his back. His mate did the same, both of them beaming happily.
Mary laughed loudly. ‘I love these guys, Angie! Down in Veeklehouse, a man would be ashamed of scars like that because it would show he’d done something wrong and been punished, but up here, they’re proud proud of them. And quite right too! What could be better proof that they’ve turned away from John and back to Gela? Let’s just hope that one waking, all the Johnfolk in Eden will be as brave as them.’
It didn’t seem possible to me that these people could have changed in two wakings from believing one story was true, to believing another. I thought it was pretty obvious that they’d just pretended to change their minds so as to save themselves, and I was kind of surprised that Mary couldn’t see that, seeing as she was older than me, and so much smarter, and so much wiser about people. In fact I wasn’t just surprised. I was actually a bit shaken by her saying something so silly and dumb. I’d given up my old friends and family for this woman and, as long as I travelled round with her, there was little chance of my making new friends or finding a new family. I’d shut away a whole big part of my life that I knew she wouldn’t approve of. I’d set aside all the old stories I’d grown up with. And all of that was based on her being smart smart, and seeing things I couldn’t see.
‘We humans are clever, aren’t we, with the stories we tell ourselves?’ I finally said, when the guards were up ahead and out of hearing distance. ‘Harry Stonehand shamed those people, beat them, made them feel small small. But, even though they were beaten, they found a way of turning that round, and making themselves feel big and strong all over again.’
There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. I’d come at this from a direction Mary wasn’t expecting, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it.
‘Yeah,’ she finally answered, a little doubtfully. ‘Yeah, I guess so.’ Then she smiled. She was smart, and she too had figured out a way of turning a story round. ‘And quite right too,’ she said happily. ‘Because of course it’s not being beaten when you come back to True Family. It’s winning. It’s always winning. Because it’s joining the side that’s bound to win in the end.’
She leaned forwards, put an arm round me to pull me against her and kissed my cheek from behind. It seemed like I’d worried her a bit for a moment there, but now she felt as sure and confident as ever. ‘What you’ve got to remember, Angie dear, is that when people are wrong, they know it deep down. It’s hard to admit to being wrong of course, but it’s always a relief as well.’
Well, that shut me up, because I knew it was true only too well. I knew I had things that I ought to tell her about, and I knew it was wrong that I didn’t. So I felt badly about that, as I always did, whenever I thought about it. And yet in a funny way, I was pleased I felt bad, because it meant that Mary was right, and that what she’d said about the Rockway people made sense after all. And that meant I didn’t have to have doubts about the reasons for my choosing to be with her.
We came to Harry’s Rest, which was the Edgefolk’s biggest cluster. Everyone seemed pleased pleased to see us – I guess they didn’t have many visitors up there – and after we’d been given a big meal and had a good long sleep in one of their shelters, Mary put on a fine show in front of one of the most excited crowds I’d yet seen. Mary was quite right about the Edgefolk. Whatever their reasons for giving up John and turning to David, they didn’t seem to have any doubts about it now.
As usually happened when we put on a show in the main cluster of a guard leader’s ground, the leader himself came along. He was a man called Mike and it so happened that we’d heard from two three of the women who’d fed us when we arrived that he was a cruel man. Out of the hearing of guards, they’d told us that he expected any girl who took his fancy to come to his shelter and take his dick, and he didn’t take it well if any woman tried to say no. The women took a risk telling us that, seeing how shadowspeakers were often close to the high people, but Mary had a reputation for being honest, and I guess they hoped she’d say something in her show about how high men should behave, seeing as shadowspeakers always spoke about things that people were doing wrong.
But Mary didn’t speak about it in the show. She spoke about how she admired the Edgefolk, and she picked out a few of their lower people for a telling-off – there was a young woman who slipped with more than one man, a man who held back from giving his share to the guards, an old woman who, so it was said, had told her granddaughters the Secret Story – but she said nothing at all about the guard leader who, so it seemed to me, had behaved much worse than any of them.
‘Mary,’ I said to her later, when we were riding on to another cluster, and the guards were too far ahead of us to hear, ‘can I ask you about something I’ve noticed? How come when you speak to people about the bad things they do, you only ever pick on low people? High people do bad things too, don’t they? That Leader Mike isn’t the only one. And surely Gela doesn’t like high men who behave like that any more than she likes low ones?’
Mary laughed. It was a special loud bright laugh that she used – or so it seemed to me – when I said something that was kind of smart, but at the same time kind of showed up the things that I still didn’t understand. There was a little bit of annoyance in it, I could tell, but then it wasn’t really surprising that she’d sometimes be irritated by my slowness, or cross with me for questioning what she did.
‘You do have sharp eyes, Angie, and you’re quite right too. Often high people do the worst things. Of course they do, because there’s no one there to stop them. And Gela cries for them, she really does, but at the same time she tells me to be careful, because if I criticize them they may send me away from their ground, and then I won’t be able to help anyone there at all. It worries me and it worries our Mother, but of course it’s the high people themselves who lose out in the end.’
She was sitting in front of me on our buck, but now she looked round and took one of my hands in hers.
‘Don’t ever think I’m on the side of the high people against the low ones, Angie, because you couldn’t be more wrong! Really you couldn’t! Gela cares most about the people whose life is the hardest: low people, women, batfaces, clawfeet.’
I smiled and nodded. I was reassured. It kind of made sense what she said, and I accepted that she understood these things much better than me. And, like I said before, no one could accuse Mary of not believing in what she did.
After we’d been round the clusters of Rockway Edge, we turned alpway again and made our way slowly back towards Veeklehouse by another path, down through middle of Wide Forest, once again zigzagging back and forth to take in as many clusters as possible.
One of the clusters was called Hot Pools, because it was near to a place where water came bubbling up from Underworld into strange yellow pools that were boiling hot, so that the people who lived there could cook their meat without even needing to make a fire: they’d just wrap it up tight in a special greased skin and lower it into the water on a string. These pools had no life or light in them at all, apart from a kind of wobbling jelly that grew round their edges and, with no wavyweed gro
wing in them, they were only lit by the trees round them. Yet they seemed to have a life of their own, bubbling and roaring and pouring out clouds of warm steam that rose up to the black sky with a strange, slightly rotten smell, like nothing I’d ever smelled before.
Hot Pools was a sad sad place when we arrived. Just two wakings before, a little girl, two three years old, had wandered off and fallen into one of those boiling pools. Of course, when the people heard her scream, it was already too late, and by the time they’d managed to fish her, or most of her, out of the boiling water with sticks and hooks tied to strings, her poor little body was already cooked and falling apart, not a child any more, or a human being, but just a mess of flesh and hair and bones. Although I didn’t know back then, as I do now, what it was like to lose your own child, I did have some idea how this must have felt for the twenty thirty people who lived at Hot Pools, because I could remember how it had been back on Knee Tree Grounds when someone drowned, or (as happened to my friend Starlight’s mother when we were little children) was taken by the spearfishes that, once in a while, would wander in from the deeper water and grab people who were cutting bark or gathering waternuts. It’s like the whole world has been poisoned when something like that happens. Nothing means anything any more, and you hate and hate this miserable dark dark Eden where people should never have come.
Mary decided straight away not to put on one of her usual shows. She just sat down in middle of the cluster, with her arm round the mum of the little girl – the woman was scarcely more than a kid herself – and talked to the Hot Pools people like a friend. She told them how Mother Gela never let go, however bad things were. She told them how that little girl’s shadow had flown to Earth and come alive again, as alive as she’d ever been. She told them Gela would look after that little girl, and dry her tears, and make her forget those few dreadful heartbeats between her fall into the boiling water and her death.
Daughter of Eden Page 9